All In the Same Boat

"Women and children first" has gained a warped new meaning as congress snips and snipes away at the country's spending. And as much as I've been ignoring the media lately, I've not been able to ignore a certain gnawing unease, the feeling that all isn't right with the world, and it's only going to get worse.

The university where I work is holding RIF (Reduction in Force) information sessions as a lead up to what we are told are inevitable layoffs. While I've been assured that my own job is secure (oh, good), things don't look great for those who will be unemployed. (You can bet it isn't going to be any of the six-figure salaried coaches getting laid off, either.)

I sit back and wonder how I - and all those others whose wages have stagnated, if not disappeared entirely - will continue to afford buying gas and groceries as prices go higher. I worry about my self-employed friends and family whose livelihoods depend on regular folks having the disposable income to purchase the products and services they offer. I nudge my daughter to at least minor in a field where she'll acquire marketable skills and not just a diploma to hang on the wall when she finishes college in 2 years.(Especially if she wants that wall to be in Boston and not back here in Bubba County.)

Meanwhile I do catch sound bites wherein presidential aspirants affirm that they are going to do everything they can possibly do to see that more money keeps flowing to those poor deserving corporation-persons. They want us to believe that we the people owe it to the billionaires to see that their standard of living is preserved. Politicians, and a disturbing number of otherwise sane folks, tell them and us that's also the way to create jobs, revive the economy, and maybe even create a slice of heaven on earth, at least here in America.

"Bale" Out Scheme

And I have to remind myself to breathe . . .

But then I read Maggie's recent entry in Flying the Coop , and my whatever-it-is was suddenly put into words. Although Maggie is writing from (and most often about) the idyllic Tuscan countryside, she articulates the malaise I feel here in Appalachia. We seem to share a tentative yet tenacious hold on the good life as we know and define it, in regions geographically disparate yet equally beautiful, looking off to the distant other side of this mess the world is in.

"...[E]verywhere we go people are communicating their fear about where our world is heading. I mean, really, everyone is talking about this: in the butchers, the fruit and vegetable shop, the farmers and retirees on the streets of our village, in the towns and cities, at the dinners I recently spoke of and at Gianni' s house almost daily. We are all talking about the fragile state of the global economy, the dangerous state of global warming, and the pitiful state of government," Maggie writes. She also talks about "common sense" -- common in that it is something widely held -- and shares an e-mail that expresses what I struggle to bring to the forefront of my own consciousness: We can do something about this, and not let them paralyze us in fear of what's to come. We can insist that our elected representatives stop being corporate whores and instead legislate for the many, not the few.

The e-mail Maggie quotes goes so far as to propose a "Congressional Reform Act of 2011," which, realistically we cannot expect to be acted upon because, well, it would take an act of Congress. But I do acknowledge the need for more of us to get involved, to have our voices heard, and to expose the posers who try to come off as one of us during daytime campaign stumps while bedding down with their moneyed puppetmasters every night.

Regardless of what you believe, we are all in the same boat. And it's a big enough boat that it won't matter if there are more of us on the left or the right -- that won't make a difference in whether we sink or not. What matters, it seems, is all of us paying close attention to where we're heading...

(Cross-posted from post-raphaelite sisterhood)

Smalltime Soliloquy

"These days I sit on cornerstones

And count the time in quarter tones to ten, my friend"

The old chiming clock in the entry has today acquired a brand new tone at the quarter hour...something more querulous and slightly doubtful. Small birds come to the pine cone feeder now and demand to be identified: Black And White Warbler, Yellow-Rumped Warbler, Tufted Titmouse, brown Carolina Wren; tiny pterodactyls whose names are bigger than they are. Books everywhere in this house beg to be read and people keep writing more. Bill Bryson's At Home whispers in my earbuds. Old music launches in the embedded player in my head, with or without permission, triggered by the scent of lavender soap, or a tone of voice, or a deep shade of green. 

And with each of these I become wholly fascinated; I want to go no further out into the world, but to stay right here and explore within, following each enticement until I have my fill. It's a life lived small. It condenses until I am not just contented with it; I am exhilarated by it. The Incredible Shrinking Life...The Interpolated Life.

In the background, behind the exploding countries, grasping headlines and blasts of  news that snatch at us, there have  been quiet, often troubled, conversations going on here amongst elderbloggers, especially those of us who have retired in the past five years. We did everything right. We saved, invested, balanced and polished those portfolios, and still we landed flat on our asses. Many of us cling to the slim hope that backing the right man in '08 might yet deliver us from evil. How could those careful plans fall apart? It isn't an exaggeration to say we are trying to figure out whether or not to sink into despair and bitterness.

I throw the travel brochures away without dreaming. I've learned to shop with my eyes alone. Dinner out at someplace fancier than the corner Italian is a semi-annual event. I have no answers and, frankly, I don't expect any. I've done my grieving--not that there won't be more, but I won't go back to black--and I am ready to capitalize on an only-child's familiarity with solitude and lower pitched pursuits. They suit my dwindled ration of vigor.

                                 Reverse cannot befall that fine Prosperity

                                         Whose sources are interior.

                                 As soon Adversity

                                 A diamond overtake,

                                 In far Bolivian ground;

                                 Misfortune hath no implement

                                 Could mar it, if it found.

                                                          --Emily Dickinson

I remember being a young mother of two, moving across the country every three or four years as the military dictated, so absorbed with the most important tasks in a woman's life: Creating home, making safety, nurturing those exquisite little children. My awareness was so entirely externalized that I could hardly hear my own thoughts; I might snag  half of a thought between the time I swung my legs into the bed at night and the instant my head hit the pillow. Who cared, when the senses were so full of four-year-olds, warm laundry, mashed potatoes with melted cheese? 

In those days, my parents were the age I am now and retired. They were frugal people by virtue of their Depression childhoods. I didn't give their life much thought (having so little room in my head for any thoughts at all), even though they told me about it. I knew they worked cross-word puzzles together; that my father golfed on Wednesdays; that my mother quilted with one group and learned to paint china with another; that my father followed my mother into avid political activism; that they loved to set out on day trips in the car with no intention but to turn down small roads they had often passed by and wondered about, to stop and talk with the people they found there and to learn their stories. 

Theirs was an enviably full and creative retirement, a well-rounded model for the rest of us. But I had no time to pay close attention to their lives. And they stayed put while I moved and moved and moved far away. And, what's worse, I imagined they really "had no life," because their big, important jobs were behind them. Their existence had contracted and mine had ballooned to burst my head. 

I figured they were bound to be dysthymic, dissatisfied with their limited worlds after the ado they'd once gone through. Now, of course, I see that I was wrong. Their lives were nearly frantic compared to mine today. And they were as contented with their lot as I am coming to be with mine, however reduced.

Many things limit my reach these days--modest means, fragile sinews, dwindling time--but nothing as yet limits my capacity. 

And I have the extreme pleasure of sharing this smalltime gig with you.

Carolina Wren, Black and White Warbler, Tufted Titmouse, Yellow-rumped Warbler